The big crowds at Madison Square Garden during wartime and a few years after, the excitement at union halls and summer camps for some of the most interesting musicians and lyricists of the time? Gone — gone, but not entirely forgotten.
John le Carré died Saturday at eighty-nine. His novels rejected the glamor and ritz of Cold War–era spy fiction. Instead, he portrayed espionage as a dreary, disturbing machine that ground up innocents for a goal that didn’t justify the human cost.
At one time this magazine tangled with the FBI, the Atomic Energy Commission and Joseph McCarthy
Taken together, or alone, the reasons offered in defense of the bomb do not justify the massacre of civilians. We debase ourselves, and the history of civilization, if we accept that Japanese atrocities warranted an American atrocity in reply.
For China, the global war for influence is about trading partners. For the U.S., it could mean something more volatile. China recently softened its language toward the U.S., stressing peaceful co-existence.
75 years ago today the United States unleashed nuclear destruction on Japan and the world. “Nuclear war is a raging, insatiable beast whose instincts and appetites we pretend to understand but cannot possibly control.” Nothing justifies these weapons
Coups in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 were US Cold War victories. In Indonesia between 500,000 and 1,000,000 were killed. This led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination and our current global economic system.
The pandemic inflames inequalities throughout the country
Defense spending is higher now than it was during the Korean or Vietnam conflicts and may soon be twice the Cold War average. The end of the Cold War resulted in that rarest of all things: real cuts in the Pentagon budget.
“If everyone intermingled—like we did when we linked up with the Russians—there could be no war.” On April 25, 1945, American and Russian soldiers met at the Elbe River and made a pledge for peace that we should heed today.
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